Thank goodness that’s over for another year!! I tell myself that I’m good and that I don’t think about my past much, but I’m such a big fat liar!! It’s impossible to go through Christmas, the one time of the year when a family is supposed to be together, without thinking about said family. Sure, I know they’re dysfunctional and I know that as soon as I leave the party, they all start talking about me and how screwed up I am, but for some reason, I still think about wanting to be a part of it!

What the heck is up with that?! I am no spring chicken, in fact, I’m over halfway through my life and up until last year, I hadn’t been invited to Christmas day dinner for close to three decades! So why the heck would I want to be around people that don’t want to be around me?! It’s ridiculous, but I have this hope that one day they will see the error of their ways and realize that I am a good person and I will get the apologies that are owed to me.

This time last year my oldest daughter and I started talking to each other for the first time in our lives. Prior to that, she was told that I had Munchausen’s syndrome; “a factitious disorder, a mental disorder in which a person repeatedly and deliberately acts as if he or she a has a physical or mental illness when he or she is not really sick,” and that nothing that came out of my mouth was the truth. My family of origin told her that I didn’t love her and that I had never wanted to have her or her younger sister.

I’m not sure what I did to deserve this kind of treatment, but I believe they told her this to discredit me and everything I said. They would wait until I had left the room and then they would all laugh and joke about how screwed up I was. Now, she tells me that she’s sorry for being a part of it, and she’s embarrassed because she laughed too, but I know how convincing they are, and they had her believing in all of their lies.

What changed it all around for her? I think part of it was me. I sent her all the correspondence that had gone back and forth between my family of origin and me since email had originated. Email after email, she got to read all of them and she started to put all the contradictions they had told her about me, together and realized that it wasn’t me that had been lying to her all these years, it was them. She was angry, and she wrote a letter to them, asking about the emails, but answers weren’t forthcoming.

I think what topped it all off and put the icing on the cake; so, to speak, was when my family of origin went to the police and told them that my oldest daughter and I were harassing them and that if we didn’t stop, they would have us both charged - charged!! All my oldest daughter did was ask a few questions about the emails that my family of origin and I had written back and forth to each other, and they deleted and blocked her on social media.

It’s been almost a year since any of my family of origin; their grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc., has said two words to her or her younger sister, and from what I can see, she did nothing to them – neither of them did, except maybe ask a few questions about my past and what she had read in the plethora of emails I had sent her. The emails were contradictory to everything she’d been told by my family of origin over the years and she just wanted to make sense of them …only she never got any answers, only silence.

Honestly, I’ve really struggled with ALL of it. I never did anything to deserve the kind of treatment I’ve gotten from most of my family of origin. I was abused; mentally, physically and sexually and nobody wants to talk about it and when my kids started asking questions, they were treated, and are still being treated like they’ve done something wrong and it just isn’t right.

I need to get past my PAST and move on. I need to stop thinking about my family of origin and why they did what they did, or why they’re still trying to hide it! Who the heck cares?! The only reason I do, is because I believe parents are supposed to love unconditionally and I just don’t get whatever it was that I did, to deserve the life they’ve given me. Maybe I need to listen to the masses and move past it, because the masses are saying, it has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with them. Let it go.

; I'm Still Here!

; I'm Still Here, is a guide to living with and surviving PTSD - post traumatic stress disorder. It is a true story written by a survivor describing the symptoms, triggers and treatments that are currently available.

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